Obama to unveil plans for Mars shot

United States president Barack Obama is set to unveil plans to create 2,500 more space jobs and select a design for a rocket to fire astronauts into deep space by 2015, The Washington Post reports.

Mr Obama will deliver what has been billed as a "major space policy speech" outlining the new future for US space exploration when he addresses astronauts, space workers and lawmakers on Thursday at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

His address comes after budget proposals in February revealed plans to axe the expensive and over-budgeted Constellation rocket project, a move that fuelled a storm of criticism from lawmakers and space enthusiasts.

But the Post reported on its website that Mr Obama's speech would seek to soothe critics and provide more specific details of plans to recreate NASA's human space exploration program in what a White House official said amounted to a "bold and daring" vision.

Mr Obama will reveal plans to "revise and retain" some elements of the Constellation rocket and capsule system and will allocate $US40 million ($42.9 million) to retrain workers who will lose their jobs when the space shuttle goes into retirement next year, according to the Post.

He will also promise to create 2,500 more jobs by 2012 than Constellation would have created, thanks to billions of dollars that will be spent on upgrading the Kennedy Space Centre in the coming years, new jobs coming from launching new commercial rockets and work on the Orion space capsule.

Some of the $US3.8 billion spent in research and technology on Orion will help design and build a "slimmed down" version of the spacecraft, a senior administration official told the Post.

An unmanned Orion would then be launched to the International Space Station on commercial rockets for possible use as an astronaut escape vehicle.

Mr Obama's speech will also outline "concrete" plans to send astronauts to asteroids, the Moon, the moons of Mars and eventually to Mars itself, the Post reported.

It's a fundamental human yearning to be a part of something bigger than one's self, and maybe that's what drove my mate Ash to die, far from home, in a bloody foreign war against Islamic State, writes C August Elliott.